Short Poems

These days which, like yourself,
Seem empty and effaced
Have avid roots that delve
To work deep in the waste.

WHAT was the use of not leaving it there where it would hang what was the use if there was no chance of ever seeing it come there and show that it was handsome and right in the way it showed it. The lesson is to learn that it does show it, that it shows it and that nothing, that there is nothing, that there is no more to do about it and just so much more is there plenty of reason for making an exchange.

When I did name her little lost one, she
Brushed from her eyes the precious drops of love,
As if her memory with his sweet name shaken
Trembled, and shed its dew.

A blight, a gloom, I know not what, has crept upon my gladness--
Some vague, remote ancestral touch of sorrow, or of madness;
A fear that is not fear, a pain that has not pain's insistence;
A sense of longing, or of loss, in some foregone exsistence;
A subtle hurt that never pen has writ nor tongue has spoken--
Such hurt perchance as Nature feels wen a blossomed bough is broken.

A monk sips morning tea,
it's quiet,
the chrysanthemum's flowering.


Translated by Robert Hass

Old Santa Claus is up-to-date,
And hereafter, rumors say,
He'll come with his pack of glittering toys,
And visit the homes of girls and boys,
In a new reindeerless sleigh.

God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work
to me which He has not committed to another I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection
between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good.
I shall do His work.

I'm not his wife. I am his paramour:
His wayside love, picked up in journeying:
Rose of the hedgerows; fragrant, till he fling
Me down beside the ditch, a drooped thing
Some country boy may stick into his hat.
A paramour has no more use than that.

Here is a fact
that should help you fight a bit longer:
Things that don’t actually kill you outright
make you stronger.

THE ring, so worn as you behold,
So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:
The passion such it was to prove--
Worn with life's care, love yet was love.